I actually love it when a brand redesigns their logo, but due to the subtleness of the logo design—in this case, more of a freshen up than a redesign—the roll-out ends up being somewhat low-key. Can’t say I have my ear completely glued to the ground, but I do like to think I’m reasonably up on logo news, and sometimes even catching new stuff like when Flickr recently changed a colour in their logo.
I only caught a whiff of the new Tumblr logo this morning, over on Brand New: Blink and You’ll Miss it, whilst catching up on my RSS feeds.
Practice Restraint
It’s one of those logo updates that just completely makes sense, restraint was practiced (which I always really admire when it’s done right) with careful attention to the new letter shapes and their overall connectedness as a whole.
Overall, the new Tumblr logo feels: more tumblier (bouncier?) and friendlier, yet at the same time also more refined, solid, and as musicians would say: tight.
The Tumblr in-house design team seems to have completely nailed this one good and proper.
The one down-side, which seems to be a general consensus across the internet, is that that the ‘u’ looks a bit odd where it’s missing the upper left serif. More so because the m, b, l and r still have it, so has a somewhat lack of consistency, but nothing major. I can see it annoying some people…
As a little side-note: This is a nice little lesson in logo redesign restraint that Yahoo (Marissa) should, at some point, ponder over. Almost a shame Tumblr didn’t do this first before Yahoo completed nuked their own logo redesign.
New & OId Tumblr Logo Comparison
Just mocked-up a quick logo sheet with the old and new Tumblr logo as a couple of overlays, so you can better see where each letter has changed. In fact, some of the changes: specially the ‘r’, do look pretty major when you look at the letters individually, but when the logo is viewed as a whole, not so much.
With the 3rd example titled: “Old (Pink Outline) & New (Blue Outline) Overlay with shifted letters”, all I did was to shift the letters sideways a little so each letters overlay was aligned more vertically aligned
Tumblr’s Logo Guidelines
Loving Tumblr’s simple, and lighthearted set of logo guidelines.
Far from being anal like Twitter, Tumblr are allowing some flexibility in the use of their logo, such as using different colours of the initial ‘t’ logo, and even use different style containers. Great to see a brand as entrenched into society as Tumblr is, still allowing a decent amount of flexibility in the practical use of their brand ID.
Way to go.
